Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

“Like you might have been sick, but it turns out you’re not.”

“Yes! It was nothing serious. It’s not something that’s going to be a recurring thing with me.”

Dana decided to take a chance. “So let’s think of it as a medical test. You had some symptoms that might have indicated something serious, like cancer. But it turns out you don’t have cancer.”

“Right!”

“Of course it’s great that you don’t have cancer. But you still had those symptoms. Isn’t it worth figuring out what it was that gave you those symptoms?”

Jorge looked blank. “If it’s not cancer, what does it matter?”

“Well, it could be something else, something it’d help you to know about.”

“I got the answer I needed.” He shrugged. “That’s good enough for now.”

“Okay, that’s fine,” said Dana. No sense in pushing the issue. She was sure he’d get there eventually.

It’s a commonly held belief that you would have been born in any branch where your parents met and had children, but no one’s birth is inevitable. Silitonga intended his yearlong experiment to show how the act of conception was highly contingent on circumstances, including the day’s weather.

Ovulation is a gradual and regulated process, so the same egg cell emerges from the follicle no matter whether it’s raining or shining that day. The sperm cell that reaches that egg, however, is like a winning Ping-Pong ball siphoned from a lottery drum as it rotates; it’s the result of utterly random forces. Even if the external circumstances surrounding an act of intercourse appear identical in the two branches, it takes only an imperceptible discrepancy to cause one spermatozoon to fuse with the ovum rather than another. Consequently, as soon as weather patterns are visibly different in two branches, all instances of fertilization are affected. Nine months later, every mother around the globe is giving birth to a different infant in each of the two branches. This is immediately evident when the child is a boy in one branch and a girl in the other, but it remains true even when the children are the same sex. The newly christened Dylan in one branch is not the same as the Dylan in the other; the two are siblings.

This is what Silitonga demonstrated when he and his parallel self exchanged the DNA tests of infants born a year after activating a prism, in a paper titled “The Effect of Atmospheric Turbulence on Human Conception.” He had used a different prism from the one in his “Error Propagation” paper to avoid the question of whether the publication of that experiment’s results had somehow created divergences that wouldn’t have otherwise occurred. At the time of these children’s conceptions, there had been no communication at all between the two branches. Every child had a different chromosomal makeup than their counterpart in the other branch, and the only possible cause had been the outcome of a single quantum measurement.

Some people still argued that the broader course of history wouldn’t change between the two branches, but it became a more difficult case to make. Silitonga had shown that the smallest change imaginable would eventually have global repercussions. For a hypothetical time traveler who wanted to prevent Hitler’s rise to power, the minimal intervention wasn’t smothering the baby Adolf in his crib; all that was needed was to travel back to a month before his conception and disturb an oxygen molecule. Not only would this replace Adolf with a sibling, it would replace everyone his age or younger. By 1920 that would have composed half of the world’s population.

Morrow had started working at SelfTalk around the same time as Nat, so neither had been an employee back when the company was thriving. When prisms were something only corporations could afford, people were happy to go to a store to communicate with parallel versions of themselves. Now that it was possible for people to buy their own prisms, SelfTalk had only a few locations left, and their customers were mostly teenagers whose parents didn’t let them use prisms or senior citizens who were unsophisticated enough that they still found the idea of paraselves a novelty.

Nat had been content to keep her head down, but Morrow had always had plans. He was promoted to store manager after coming up with a way to get new customers. Every time they got a new prism, he checked the accident reports from a month after a prism’s activation date and sent targeted advertisements to the people involved. They were often unable to resist the chance to get a glimpse of their lives if things had gone differently. None of them became long-term customers—most of them were depressed by what they learned—but they were a reliable way of generating revenue from every new prism acquired.

At the nursing home, Morrow waited just outside the door to Mrs. Oehlsen’s room while she talked to her paraself. Now they were using video for their conversations instead of text; she knew she didn’t have long left, so there was no point in conserving the prism’s pad for later. This made things difficult for the parallel Mrs. Oehlsen, though, who was now actually watching a version of herself die. Their conversation was strained—Morrow had left a microphone in the room so he could listen to them through an earpiece—although the dying Mrs. Oehlsen didn’t seem to notice.

When they were done, Mrs. Oehlsen raised her voice slightly to tell Morrow to come back in. “How did your conversation go?” he asked.

“Fine,” she said. Her breathing was labored. “If there’s one person you can talk to without pretense, it’s your own self.”

Morrow lifted the prism from the overbed table and repacked it into the carton. “Mrs. Oehlsen, if you don’t mind, I’d like to suggest something.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ve said you don’t know anyone who really deserves your money. If you really feel that way, maybe you ought to give the money to your paraself.”

“You can do that?”

Confidence was the key to selling any lie. “Money is just another form of information,” he said. “We can transmit it through a prism the same way that we transmit audio or video information.”

“Hmm, that’s an interesting idea. I know she’d put it to better use than my son would.” Her face puckered slightly as she thought about him. “How would I go about that? Would I ask my lawyer to adjust my will?”

“You could, but it will take some time before your estate is settled, and you might want to transfer the money sooner rather than later.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s a new law that goes into effect next month.” He pulled out his phone and showed her an article he had dummied up. “The government wants to discourage people from moving money out of this timeline, so they’re imposing a fifty-percent tax on fund transfers to other timelines. If you send the money before the law goes into effect, you can avoid that tax.” He could see from her expression that the idea appealed to her. “SelfTalk could handle it for you right away.”

“Make the arrangements,” she said. “We’ll do it when you visit next week.”

“I’ll have everything ready,” said Morrow.

When he got back to SelfTalk, Morrow used the prism to send a message to his parallel self, asking him to play along. The two of them would tell the parallel Mrs. Oehlsen that this one was becoming delusional from the pain medication, believing that she had sent money across the prism, and it would be better to humor her in her remaining days. That would probably suffice, but if necessary, they could always put an end to the video conversations altogether by saying that another client had unexpectedly exhausted the prism’s pad.